Rachel Ward reviews the fourth episode of Young Apprentice in which the
candidates were asked to sell products to the over-50s at a retail show.

Following forays into the floristry business and the baby market you’d think that Lord Sugar would have given his teenage hopefuls a break this week, but he continued to challenge his remaining contestants with another task outside their comfort zone: to sell products to the over-50s.

In a rather tongue-in-cheek move, Sugar invited the nine candidates to meet him at the Natural History Museum – home to all things old and wrinkly.

“Do you think that Lord Sugar lives in the Natural History Museum?” said one cheeky contender, a remark that seemed previously prepared by the producers.

Standing next to the full-size dinosaur skeleton in the entrance of the museum, jolly Sugar and his elderly aide Nick Hewer seemed to relish in this tomfoolery, making silly jokes about fossils. Hewer, in particular, couldn’t contain himself and had to turn away from the camera to conceal his smirks.

And so with an initial lack of enthusiasm, the hopefuls went off to decide who would be team leaders.

Irish James proposed he was the best person to take the helm of team Kinetic because: “I’m 16 going on 67.” While bossy Haya pushed over competition from school prefect and Boris Johnson-wannabe Harry to lead team Atomic.

As the teams split up to assess the different products on offer (which included a pie maker, a hand-held vacuum cleaner, a designer shopping trolley, and birdbox with built-in camera) the cracks began to appear on Atomic. Bossy Haya and little Lewis seemed to have a certain rapport in the initial stages: “I think old people are lovely, whenever I see them I just feel sorry for them. I want to give them a big hug and squeeze them,” Lewis commented. “Squeeze the money out of them?” replied a cynical Haya. But the steely stares soon came thick and fast from Haya when Lewis waffled his way through the pitch to try to secure the deal for the designer shopping trolleys (he failed).

Have-a-go Harry was next in line for insult as Haya refused to consider his recommendation for the portable pillow. Meanwhile, team Kinetic seemed to be doing fairly well under James’s sensible management.

At the retail show the teams got to grips with selling their products. The shopping trolley proved a hard sell with the penny-pinching pensioners, while the hand-vac cleaned up making team Kinetic a tidy profit of over eight hundred pounds. Atomic had less luck. Lewis’s sample pies were going down a treat with the perusing punters but they weren’t sticking around long enough to part with their hard-earned cash. And the bird boxes weren’t exactly flying off the shelves either for Harry M and Hayley.

The boardroom proved a predictable affair with Haya’s losing team under scrutiny for getting their product choice and pricing all wrong. The blaming and shaming came from all angles but it was little Liverpudlian Lewis who was sent packing. There’s no bitter side to Sugar in this junior version of the programme and he rather overcompensates by being too sweet, especially by treating the fired candidate to a ride in his Rolls-Royce Phantom, rather than the standard black cab. As little Lewis jumped into the back of the getaway car he seemed even smaller in comparison. Perhaps a pointer to the fact that these kids aren’t ready for the big bad world quite yet.